Wednesday, June 23, 2010

I wanted to share a craft that I taught to a group of little kids last week. Portland has been having an incredibly rainy spring/summer and I though we would just go ahead and celebrate it with a rainy craft. I have seen a bazillion crafts that can be made from paper plates and I have promised myself(for the sake of not being too predictable) not to use them every week, but then I came up with this little umbrella idea and just had to try it out.

Here is what you need: paper plates,blue and brown construction paper,blue or gray yarn,glue,scissors and tape.

Cut the paper plate in half and decorate it with paint,markers or stickers. After it is decorated cut a handle shape out of brown construction paper and glue to the back of your umbrella.

Fold a long 1 inch thick strip of blue construction paper like an accordion. Draw a raindrop shape at one end and cut (this just saves time cutting out individual rain drops).

Cut the yarn into short varying lengths about 4-6 inches long. Glue two raindrops together with the piece of yarn in between. Make as many drops per string as you like, 1-3 work best.Then tape the yarn to the back top edge of the umbrella and... ta da, your done. It looks kinda cute hung up in a window too!

7 comments:

I'm the Editorial Assistant for Fun Family Crafts and I wanted to let you know that we have featured your umbrella project! You can see it here:

http://funfamilycrafts.com/paper-plate-umbrella/

If you have other kid friendly crafts, we'd love it if you would submit them. If you would like to display a featured button on your site, you can grab one from the right side bar of your post above. Thanks for a wonderful project idea!

I used this craft with my kindergarten students but incorporated math into it but just using 2 strings, one on each side of umbrella handle and then giving each student a different number of raindrops. They had to glue raindrops on each string and then write the addition sentence on the umbrella :) it was a big hit!

This is a really cute craft. There are so many things to make out of paper plates but when it's creative I don't see anything wrong with using them over and over again for different creative ideas! I especially loved the idea of placing it on a window on a rainy day. It helps children understand weather concepts.